School Night
by carpetinflight
Summary: Moving to Sunnydale is a good thing, Dawn thinks. It won't be like L.A. gen


Dawn stopped in the doorway, looking but not walking into Buffy's room. Buffy always got mad when she came in without knocking. Not like there was anything to snoop through, anyway, when everything was in boxes.

Buffy was standing in front of the mirror --like _always_-- with a shiny black dress in one hand. She held it up to her body, looked at her reflection, and said, "Hello, I'm an enormous slut."

"Hey, slut," Dawn replied, stepping into the room and making her way to the unmade bed. She didn't really know what that meant, exactly, but she knew it was bad, and that was all she cared about.

"Who said you could come in?" Buffy asked, but it was halfhearted and she didn't actually do anything, so Dawn sat down on the edge of the bed.

Buffy kept going through her closet, picking out clothes and holding them up to herself before putting them back. Dawn sighed. Buffy had so many nice clothes. She even had _boobs_ to fill them out. Dawn smoothed her shirt down the flat expanse of her chest. It was like less than flat. Maybe her lungs actually dipped in a little, like a funhouse mirror. It wasn't fair. Buffy got to have everything: high school, cute clothes, boobs, _and_ she got to go out to a club with boys on a school night.

"Mom! How come Buffy gets to go out on a school night?" Dawn yelled into the hallway, trusting that wherever she was in the house, her mom would hear.

"Brat," Buffy hissed. Dawn ignored her.

Sure enough, their mother's head appeared in the doorway.

"Oh, are you going out?" she asked, looking at Buffy.

"I'm going to a club, mom."

"Will there be boys there?"

"No, Mom. It's a club for nuns."

Joyce beamed at Buffy, and Dawn scowled and kicked the side of the bed. It wasn't fair.

Mom grasped Buffy's shoulders with both hands and looked into her eyes. "You're a good girl, Buffy. You are. You just fell in with the wrong crowd."

Dawn rolled her eyes. Mom could be _so_ clueless. She never even _tried_ to find out the real story about Buffy's so-called "bad crowd" in L.A. Even the third graders heard about it when the high school gym burned down, when there were weird stories everywhere about seniors dying and then showing up at the Spring Formal after they were dead and buried. Dawn heard all that stuff, and more besides. She knew what her parents argued about behind closed doors, what Buffy had hidden in the cedar trunk underneath her pom-poms. Mom wanted to blame everything in L.A. on one leather-jacket-wearing, motorcycle-riding boyfriend, but she, Dawn, was smarter than that.

"C'mere, Dawnie," Mom said, pulling partially away from Buffy and holding out one arm. Dawn scowled --she hated that baby nickname-- but went anyway, snuggling up to her mom's side.

"I know it's hard for you girls: a new town, new schools, and everything. It is for me, too. I'm trying to make it work. I'm _going_ to make it work."

The three of them stood there like three sides to a triangle, and Dawn leaned her cheek against Buffy's arm and tried not to think about how it was before, when they were a rectangle, two parents and two kids, four sides like a house. Now they were three, a triangle, like a teepee.

"Buffy needs a more nurturing environment," Mom had said. "We need to get out of L.A." Dad had been angry, and he'd yelled. Dawn heard it all, sitting on the floor of her closet with a juice glass pressed to the wall, just like Harriet the Spy. Then Mom cried, and Dawn cried too, and then Mom yelled back and that made her cry more. When they left L.A., Dad didn't come. It was just the three of them now.

Later, Dawn sat in the window of her room, with the lights off so no one could see her. Outside, the sun had set and the street was lit only with streetlights. It got darker here at night than in L.A., where there was always something lit up with neon, and bright searchlights lit the sky. Sunnydale was a place where you could actually see the stars. A nice, normal place.

Outside, there was the soft sound of a door opening and closing. Dawn looked down and saw her sister walk out of the house and turn left on the sidewalk, the streetlights reflecting gold light off her hair. Dawn let herself imagine what Buffy would do tonight -- dance with boys, maybe, or make some new friends. And if Buffy could do it, why couldn't she?

"Dawn's sister is that freak who burned down the gym at Hemery," everyone said at her old school. Even the _sixth_ graders knew about it, and nobody would sit with her at lunch. A new school, a new town, and a new class with no talk of dead people dancing or Buffy destroying the school was just right. Buffy could leave those old wooden stakes and holy water inside her trunk where they belonged, and they could all have a normal life again, in Sunnydale.


End file.
